Writer Vladimir Nabokov is shown in Montreux, Switzerland, in Dec. 1976. (AP Photo)

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The great novelist and short story writer Vladimir Nabokov emigrated to the United States, made his fortune with the publication of the incendiary “Lolita,” and then decamped to a hotel in Switzerland for the rest of his life.

He died in 1977, leaving behind — on 138 handwritten index cards — the fragments of a final book titled “The Original of Laura.” He wanted it destroyed. His wife, who once saved “Lolita” from the flames, declined.

Now, it’s out. Nabokov’s last work, published against his dying wish.

This hour, On Point: from the fragments of a master, Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura.” 

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and author of numerous books on Nabokov, including “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years,” “Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years,” and “Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery.” His most recent book is “On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction.”

Leland de la Durantaye, a professor of English at Harvard University and the author of “Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.”

More links:

To mark Nabokov’s 100th birthday in April 1999, Random House created a special site devoted to the author’s life and work.  It’s a good introduction, and includes an essay by our guest Brian Boyd on Nabokov’s memoir, “Speak, Memory.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (Photo: David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons)

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Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer made his name young and powerfully.

In two startlingly fresh books — “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” — he brought a new generation’s eye to the Holocaust and to the shock of 9/11.

Now, the young novelist has gone non-fiction to look at the most elemental of human habits: what we eat. Specifically, the factory-farmed meat Americans consume in titanic volumes.

He thinks it’s wrong. He may persuade you.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Jonathan Safran Foer on his new book, “Eating Animals.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Jonathan Safran Foer joins us from New York. He’s the author of the acclaimed novels “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” His new book,  “Eating Animals,” is a  nonfiction appeal for a moral reconsideration of meat eating.

You can read an excerpt from “Eating Animals” at the book’s website.

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Columbus did it most famously in 1492, and ever since people from all over have been coming to America.

Every group had it challenges.

Arab-Americans have a story of their own. A story that’s gotten hotter with time.

In mosque and church and town hall, Arab-Americans have put down deep roots. But events have not made it easy. Arab-Israeli war. Iraq wars. Oil tensions. 9.11.

This hour, On Point: We’ll talk with civil rights lawyer and writer Alia Malek about her new look at the history, and reality now, of Arab America.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Alia Malek, author of “A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories.”

(Photo: Flickr/eliazar)

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They say there’s a time and place for everything.

Mark Di Vincenzo is focused on the time — the best time — to fly, to see the Mona Lisa, to get a tattoo, to buy ketchup.

An awful lot of us just do everything on Saturday. Big mistake, he says. For buying, selling, traveling, working out, taking vitamins, making an offer on a house, seeing the dentist, getting married, filing for divorce — there’s a top time, he says, and he’s tracked it down.

This hour, On Point: “Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon.” We’re talking about the time of our lives, with Mark Di Vincenzo.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Mark Di Vincenzo joins us from Hampton, Virginia. He’s the author of “Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon: A Guide to the Best Time to Buy This, Do That, and Go There.” He worked as a journalist for 24 years, and, in 1997, founded the Business Writers Group, a company that writes for corporate clients.

A page from Carl Jung's "Red Book," 1914-1930, to be published next month. (Courtesy of W.W. Norton)

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Carl Jung was a giant in the dawn of the age of psychoanalysis. A student of Freud who broke with Freud. Champion of the individual spiritual quest as doorway to the universal.

In midlife, he looked for his own soul and found nothing. Dug deeper, for years, late at night, recording wild visions: gods and demons, winged snakes and crocodiles. Found his soul’s footing, but feared he’d be called insane.

Jung said his “red book,” in which he recorded his visions, was the base of everything else he did. But it was locked away for years in a Swiss vault. Now it’s out. We have it.

This hour, On Point: Carl Jung’s red book.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Portland, Maine, is Sara Corbett, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her article “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious,” about Carl Jung’s “Red Book,” appears in the September 20 issue of the magazine. The book will be published by W.W. Norton next month.

And with us  in our studio is David Oswald, a licensed Jungian analyst and graduate the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. He is a member of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology.

More links:

The New York Times Magazine offers these color photographs of several facing pages from Jung’s “red book.”

We’ve posted some more images of individual pages, courtesy of W.W. Norton.

Nobel Prize-winning thinker Amartya Sen grew up well-off in an India where injustice was on everyday display. He’s been thinking about justice and injustice ever since. Not in one country, but the whole world.

Now, at 75, Sen is writing deeply on how to create justice — social justice — on a globalized planet.

A planet where no two cultures have just the same concept of justice.

A planet where long effort to build ideal institutions of justice have fallen painfully short.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Amartya Sen, on the world we live in and the idea of justice.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Amartya Sen joins us in our studio. He is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. A son of Bengal, he is a longtime champion of the disadvantaged. His new book is, a kind of great summation, is “The Idea of Justice.” London’s Independent calls it “a monumental work.”

Sam Tanenhaus has spent twenty years studying American conservatism. Hobnobbed with Bill Buckley. Wrote a much-admired biography of Whittaker Chambers. Dipped deep into the core philosophy of Edmund Burke.

Now, he looks around to find Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, and Sarah Palin in charge of movement conservatism. Anger replacing loyal opposition. A destructive impulse killing true conservative principles.

Rush won’t like it, but Tanenhaus says honest, old-time conservatism is dead.

This hour, On Point: Sam Tanenhaus and his new book, “The Death of Conservatism.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of the Times. He’s the author of a well-received biography of Whittaker Chambers and is working on an authorized biography of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. His new book is “The Death of Conservatism.” 

Here’s an excerpt from “The Death of Conservatism” (at RandomHouse.com) and an essay in The New Republic, “Conservatism Is Dead: An Intellectual Autopsy of the Movement,” from which the book grew.

John Fund, editorial page columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy,” released in an updated edition for 2008.

Writer Nicholson Baker has taken on phone sex, Adolf Hitler, John Updike, and presidential assassination. In his new novel, he takes on poetry.

Nevermind plot. Baker’s never cared much for that. He’s got a nerdy poet. A failed romance. An overdue introduction for a poetry anthology. That’s about it.

His anthologist-poet protagonist knows how to crack the whip of language. Ezra Pound: a “blustering bigot,” he says. Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins: “A charming, chirping crack whore.”

Mostly, Baker’s anthologist does very little, but he thinks, marvelously, about poetry. About rhythm and rhyme and meter — the march, the work song, the nursery rhyme, the limerick — and the meaning of it all.

This hour, On Point: Nicholson Baker on his new novel, “The Anthologist.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Nicholson Baker joins us from Portland, Maine. He’s written seven previous novels, with his precise and playful stream of consciousness style, and four works of nonfiction. “Vox,” looks at phone sex. “Checkpoint” at assassination. “Human Smoke” controversially cast Churchill and FDR as World War II aggressors. His new novel is “The Anthologist.” You can read an excerpt here.

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The biggest city on American soil that you never heard of vanished a thousand years ago.

Cahokia, near St. Louis today, was bigger in its time than London — and its story reads now like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.

It had pyramids, temples, a “wood henge” for telling time — and organized mass human sacrifices on the Mississippi. It influenced almost every American native tribe — and the Cahokia site today is helping change our understanding of pre-Columbian America.

This hour, On Point: the ancient metropolis America forgot.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Tim Pauketat, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His new book is “Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi.” His other books include, “Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians” and “The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America.”

You can read an excerpt from “Cahokia.”

Charles C. Mann, author of “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.” He is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Science, and Wired magazines.

(AP Photo)

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“Born round, you don’t die square” — as food critic Frank Bruni’s grandma used to say.

She was talking about how central food is to a satisfying and successful life.

That theme is a big part of the former New York Times restaurant critic’s new memoir, “Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater.”

The young Frank Bruni loved Grandma Bruni’s little pastas, which each carried the shape of her thumb. Yet the love of food, he found, was a mixed blessing.

Bruni became, as he puts it, a “baby bulimic.” And by the time he was in college, eating disorders were taking over his life.

Bruni says his relationship with food has defined him. He’s fought with food, even wrestled with it in his dreams, and now brokered a delicate truce.

This Hour, On Point: Frank Bruni’s inner strength — and rating the perfect meal.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Frank Bruni, restaurant critic for The New York Times from 2004 until this month. He’s the author of “Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater.” His recent article in The New York Times Magazine, “I Was a Baby Bulimic,” was adapted from the book.

Read an excerpt (PDF file) from “Born Round.”

Brad Kessler and Hannah (Photo: Dona Ann McAdams)

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Most of us don’t herd goats anymore. Go far enough back in time, and a whole lot of humans did.

Brad Kessler left a rent-controlled apartment in New York’s East Village to raise goats in Vermont. He took it seriously — even spiritually — for himself, and now for us, in the pages of a wondrous little book on goat-herding.

There’s a reason, he writes, that Jesus, Moses, Krishna and Mohammed were all tied up with shepherds. There’s something magic here. And the cheese is pretty divine, too.

This hour: bucks, does, birth, herding, and life with goats.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us in our studio is Brad Kessler, a novelist and author of the new book “Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese.” His other books include the novels “Birds in Fall” and “Lick Creek,” as well as award-winning children’s books in the “Rabbit Ears” series.

You can browse excerpts from “Goat Song” at the publisher’s website.

More links:

Brad Kessler won the 2009 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome. The Academy’s blog posts this image of a goat on a silver didrachm, from Paros in the Cyclades, 4th-3rd century BC:

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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo made his name with gritty stories of small-town, working-class guys and their families making do, getting by — in “Nobody’s Fool,” “Empire Falls,” “Bridge of Sighs.”

His new novel sets the drama against summer vacations on Cape Cod — and sets a midlife search for happiness against the baggage handed down from parents.

The Cape is always there, waiting. And so are the shadows of mom and dad.

This hour, Richard Russo and his new novel, “That Old Cape Magic.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Richard Russo joins us in our studio. He’s the author of six previous novels, including “Mohawk,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “Straight Man,” “Empire Falls,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, and “Bridge of Sighs.” His most recent is “That Old Cape Magic.” You can read an excerpt here.

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High-drama Southern novelist Pat Conroy has been breaking sales records and breaking hearts for decades with his passionate prose out of the Carolina low country.

With blockbusters gone to film — “The Prince of Tides,” “The Great Santini,” and more — Conroy has won a readership of millions. He aims straight for the emotional heart of every story. The Washington Post calls him “the Prince of Tears.”

Now, after a 14-year break, he’s out with a new novel, set in Charleston: “South of Broad.”

This hour, On Point: A conversation with novelist Pat Conroy.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Pat Conroy joins us from Birmingham, Alabama. He’s the author of the novels “The Great Santini,” “The Lords of Discipline,” “The Prince of Tides,” and others. His new novel is “South of Broad.” You can read excerpts at RandomHouse.com.

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Barack Obama talked warmly of immigrant gifts on the campaign trail. His Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, talked tough yesterday on the Rio Grande. All nations wrestle with immigration and demographic change. Immigration made America.

Christopher Caldwell says it may unmake Europe. A wave of Islamic immigration, European-style, is now challenging Europe’s historic culture, he says. And Europeans don’t know what to do about it.

This hour, On Point: Immigration, Islam, and the changing face of Europe.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Christopher Caldwell, author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.” A senior editor at The Weekly Standard, columnist for The Financial Times, and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he has been reporting on the politics and culture of Islam in Europe for more than a decade.

You can read an excerpt from Caldwell’s book at randomhouse.com.

Joining us from Paris is Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. He reports on European politics, economy, society and new technologies, as well as developing stories throughout North Africa, the Near East and the Persian Gulf.

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In the world of pricey art galleries and top museums, the paper trail behind a painting is almost as important as the work itself. This documented history, a painting’s “provenance,” proves the work’s authenticity and can raise its value to staggering levels.

A new book tells the riveting true story of a con-man and a talented, struggling artist who teamed up to pull off what Scotland Yard called the “biggest art fraud of the 20th century.”

How did they do it? Why? And what did it mean for the world of art?

This hour, On Point: “Provenance.” A painter, a con-man, and a fraud for the ages.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Joining us from Albany, New York, is Laney Salisbury, co-author with Aly Sujo of the new book, “Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art.” 

You can read an excerpt from the book.  And on her website, Laney Salisbury offers photos of forged artworks painted by John Myatt.

And from Stoke, England, we’re joined by John Myatt. Profiled in “Provenance,” he painted over 200 forgeries that sold as the work of master artists. He served four months in prison for his role in the fraud, and now makes a living selling “legitimate fakes.”

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“Everything slows down, every second seemed like a minute.”

You’ve heard that a thousand times — or you’ve lived it once. Writer Bob Sabbag lived it.

It was around midnight, June 17, 1979. He was strapped into his seat on Air New England Flight 248. The commuter plane was trying to find the runway in deep fog.

Suddenly, the slow-motion crash through the trees, the gray chaos in the cabin, the survivors crawling out into the silent woods and waiting — and waiting — for help.

Some of Bob Sabbag’s best friends never knew he lived through a plane crash 30 years ago. He just never talked about it. Then he decided to let the memories, and the eight other survivors, in.

This hour, On Point: Living through the million moments of the crash of Flight 248.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guest:

Robert Sabbag joins us in our studio.  He has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy and the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of the best-selling “Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade,” “Smokescreen,” and “Too Tough to Die.” His new book is “Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival.”

Read an excerpt from “Down Around Midnight.”

More links:

The Cape Cod Times looks back at the 1979 crash of Air New England Flight 248 in a recent article and in this video featuring author Robert Sabbag:

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Dave Eggers has written, famously, about his own life. He’s written about real lives in Sudan. Now he’s written about a life in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun stayed in the city to care for his business and properties. He paddled down flooded streets in a canoe, helping stranded survivors and feeding abandoned dogs — until he was arrested and held without explanation in a makeshift prison.

It’s the story of a solitary man trying to take care of his neighbors and family, a man who enters a nightmare world of cages, armed guards, and abuse.

This hour, On Point: Dave Eggers and the true story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Dave Eggers joins us from San Francisco. He’s the founder of the independent publishing house McSweeney’s and author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collection “How We Are Hungry,” the novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity!,” the fictionalized memoir “What Is the What,”  and the memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” He co-wrote the film “Away We Go,” released earlier this summer, as well as the upcoming film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” to be released in October. He’s co-founder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring organization for kids up to age 18.  His new book is “Zeitoun.” You can read excerpts here and here.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun joins us from New Orleans. He’s owner of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractors. He stayed in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina hit to take care of his business and properties, and was arrested and held in Camp Greyhound, the makeshift prison set up in the early days after the storm.

The fish, sardines, would begin gathering soon after, a slow mass of silver rising from below. The fish were attracted to plankton, and the plankton were attracted to the light. They would begin to circle, a chain linked loosely, and over the next hour their numbers would grow. The black gaps between silver links would close until the fishermen could see, below, a solid mass of silver spinning.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun was only thirteen when he began fishing for sardines this way, a method called lampara, borrowed from the Italians. He had waited years to join the men and teenagers on the night boats, and he’d spent those years asking questions. Why only on moonless nights? Because, his brother Ahmad said, on moon-filled nights the plankton would be visible everywhere, spread out all over the sea, and the sardines could see and eat the glowing organisms with ease. But without a moon the men could make their own, and could bring the sardines to the surface in stunning concentrations. You have to see it, Ahmad told his little brother. You’ve never seen anything like this.

And when Abdulrahman first witnessed the sardines circling in the black he could not believe the sight, the beauty of the undulating sil- ver orb below the white and gold lantern light. He said nothing, and the other fishermen were careful to be quiet, too, paddling without motors, lest they scare away the catch. They would whisper over the sea, telling jokes and talking about women and girls as they watched the fish rise and spin beneath them. A few hours later, once the sardines were ready, tens of thousands of them glistening in the refracted light, the fishermen would cinch the net and haul them in.

They would motor back to the shore and bring the sardines to the fish broker in the market before dawn. He would pay the men and boys, and would then sell the fish all over western Syria — Lattakia, Baniyas, Damascus. The fishermen would split the money, with Abdulrahman and Ahmad bringing their share home. Their father had passed away the year before and their mother was of fragile health and mind, so all funds they earned fishing went toward the welfare of the house they shared with ten siblings.

Abdulrahman and Ahmad didn’t care much about the money, though. They would have done it for free.

Thirty-four years later and thousands of miles west, Abdulrahman Zeitoun was in bed on a Friday morning, slowly leaving the moonless Jableh night, a tattered memory of it caught in a morning dream. He was in his home in New Orleans and beside him he could hear his wife Kathy breathing, her exhalations not unlike the shushing of water against the hull of a wooden boat. Otherwise the house was silent. He knew it was near six o’clock, and the peace would not last. The morn- ing light usually woke the kids once it reached their second-story windows. One of the four would open his or her eyes, and from there the movements were brisk, the house quickly growing loud. With one child awake, it was impossible to keep the other three in bed.

Kathy woke to a thump upstairs, coming from one of the kids’ rooms. She listened closely, praying silently for rest. Each morning there was a delicate period, between six and six-thirty, when there was a chance, however remote, that they could steal another ten or fifteen min- utes of sleep. But now there was another thump, and the dog barked, and another thump followed. What was happening in this house? Kathy looked to her husband. He was staring at the ceiling. The day had roared to life.

The phone began ringing, today as always, before their feet hit the floor. Kathy and Zeitoun — most people called him by his last name because they couldn’t pronounce his first — ran a company, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC, and every day their crews, their clients, every- one with a phone and their number, seemed to think that once the clock struck six-thirty, it was appropriate to call. And they called. Usually there were so many calls at the stroke of six-thirty that the overlap would send half of them straight to voicemail.

Kathy took the first one, from a client across town, while Zeitoun shuffled into the shower. Fridays were always busy, but this one prom- ised madness, given the rough weather on the way. There had been rumblings all week about a tropical storm crossing the Florida Keys, a chance it might head north. Though this kind of possibility presented itself every August and didn’t raise eyebrows for most, Kathy and Zeitoun’s more cautious clients and friends often made preparations. Throughout the morning the callers would want to know if Zeitoun could board up their windows and doors, if he would be clearing his equipment off their property before the winds came. Workers would want to know if they’d be expected to come in that day or the next.

Excerpted from “Zeitoun,” by Dave Eggers. All rights reserved.

Back to Dave Eggers: ‘Zeitoun’

Guest:

Joining us from Mobile, Alabama is Winston Groom, author of the new Civil War history “Vicksburg 1863.” He’s the author of other history books such as “Patriotic Fire,” Shrouds of Glory,” and “Conversations with the Enemy,” as well as the bestselling novel “Forrest Gump,” upon which the hit movie was based.

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With the whole world talking about climate change and global warming, arctic biologist Bill Streever is looking the other way. He’s thinking about the cold.

Cold ice caps, cold tundra, cold lips, cold lungs. He’s looking back at cold explorers, men who died of cold.

He’s looking around at animals that thrive and survive in the cold. Frogs that become frogsicles, and hop again in spring. All things cold.

A warming climate may make cold itself an endangered species.

This hour, On Point: Igloos, permafrost, absolute zero and one man’s relentless pursuit of the cold.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Bill Streever joins us from Anchorage, Alaska. A biologist, he chairs the North Slope Science Initiative’s Science Technical Advisory Panel. He started out as a commercial diver in harbors and oilfields in Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South China Sea. His new book is “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places.”

Browse and read excerpts from the book.

More:

You can’t build igloos with powdery snow.  But you can build a quinzhee.  Bill demonstrates how it’s done in this video on YouTube:

Songlist: Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow (Frank Zappa); Hey Ya (Outkast); Antarctica (The Weepies)